11 ms·

Mozilla Hubs – Private social VR in your web browser

145 points by part1of2 6y ago

dataminded 6y ago
Dear Mozilla, Please allocate more time and energy towards becoming financially healthy. Please. There's so much demand for a trusted and privacy conscious service provider. Please look at email, domain registration, web analytics, etc, etc, etc.
- ericflo 6y ago
  Dear Mozilla, Please continue your work on this. It's one of the lowest-cost, highest-leveraged points of counterbalance against Facebook's continued attempts to dominate the platforms of the future. In addition, there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort, so if you stick with it, other Mozilla efforts will be buoyed by its success.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    No, this is silly, it's like Second Life or something else, it's only ever going to be used by Extremely Online people who will never pay a cent for the infra needed to run it or for the coders, and it will sap away at the important part of what Mozilla is doing. > there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort if you want an internet which consists of poorly rendered VRML-looking crap that bothers you for micropayments continuously, ok, sure, but most of us really want something that keeps the big FAANG types honest, and Firefox is one of the keystones of that effort.
    - mplewis 6y ago
      This looks like a novel attempt at an open, collaborative space. Why do you have to be so negative about it?
      - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
        Their money can and needs to be spent elsewhere. But then again who am I to tell them how to spend? This project isn't going anywhere, I guarantee it - but at the sane time I'd also like to be proved wrong on that.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  From a product perspective, I do think this is an important one in the longer term. VR and AR are going to be big, and Facebook is making a play to own the social space and tie it to their hardware with Horizon. There's literally no one competing with their Quest platform, so they'll be in a market position to turn Horizon into the dominant social environment for a whole lot of VR users. Without cross-platform social systems like this, you end up in a world where your grandma has an Oculus headset and if you want to virtually visit them you need to be on a Quest as well. BigScreen is another example that I'm glad still exists. Facebook would like to either own them or crush them: https://twitter.com/DShankar/status/1295825811748999173 https://twitter.com/DShankar/status/1295825811748999173 > When I announced a beta version of @BigscreenVR in 2015/2016, Facebook reached out. They told me to join them, because they were going to build the same thing and crush us. > I have many stories like this. I can share a long list of VR devs who have been trampled by Facebook.
  - jms703 6y ago
    Perhaps, but Mozilla need to pick their battle. They can’t keep splitting their resources on so many fronts.
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      Maybe there's a way that Hubs can make money? "Virtual office service" seems like the obvious answer in this growing remote work situation (see also: Immersed VR), but with Facebook's lower level hardware access they may be poised to eat that space too.
      - entropicdrifter 6y ago
        Hardware-agnostic seems like a big selling point for Mozilla's service vs FB. Unless my company is going to go all-in and buy everyone a 'work headset' like how we have work laptops, they'll want it to be cross platform compatible so users have a choice.
      - Tossrock 6y ago
        Hubs already makes money, by offering turn-key self-hosted Hubs instances for corporations via AWS image.
- Kiro 6y ago
  For ideological reasons, yes, but not for financial. I think you're overestimating the demand.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Mozilla ditched FirefoxOS for throw away projects (there is no other way to call these), FirefoxOS now KaiOS that has received more than $50 Millions in investment and is deployed on 100M cell phones, basically the 3rd OS in popularity after Android and IOS... I question Mozilla's management judgement...
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Mozilla is an insurance policy for Google to show they have competition. Anything else you see there is a falsity. I say this as a Mozilla browser and vpn user. They have no reasonable market share to speak of anymore and no direction.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Every time I see this I'm just going to ask, why Yahoo was willing $500 million a year to Google's insurance policy?
- throwaway413 6y ago
  Click link in Firefox on iOS... Get greeted with notice that says “Please copy paste URL into safari, your browser isn’t supported.” Proceed to roll eyes.
  - jeremiahlee 6y ago
    I came here to note the same experience. Come on, Mozilla…
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  IMO Mozilla should allocate 40% of their funding from Google every year into a sustainability fund. Keep it invested in very safe bonds or something. In 5 years Mozilla will be financially independent. Then they can do all this fancy stuff.
  - err4nt 6y ago
    But then how would you enrich the CEO?
- Vinnl 6y ago
  I think one of the reason Hubs was kept on was exactly because it appears to be on a path to being financially healthy while still being relevant to a free and open web: https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635490d https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635...
andreyk 6y ago
Having tried this, I think it's super impressive. I used it to set up social events to welcome new people to our group, and it went quite well. Honestly not sure why it is not more known, it's miles ahead of stuff like online.town and anything else I've seen.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
Amusingly, this link does not work in Firefox Focus. It tells me to open the link in Safari.
azinman2 6y ago
I think it's hilarious that it says 'Communicate naturally' with a photo of 3 legless avatar bodies floating in a poorly rendered 3D environment.
- kiliancs 6y ago
  Came here to say more or less the same thing. The lack of arms was what made it immediately awkward to me, even just looking at a still image.
  - amongsus 6y ago
    If they attach it to running around a ship, completing tasks, getting killed by impostors, hiding in vents, and spacing people.... It would make a pretty good game.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    You have hand tracking. There's no elbow tracking so full arm IK becomes problematic. You can still wave your hands and point at things so its more natural than the photo appears.
anonyfox 6y ago
I‘d prefer if mozilla would have finished Firefox’ transition to Rust/Servo to make their core product dramatically better and start regaining browser share. Seems that accumulating expensive C-suits, firing a chunk of their best engineers and building this instead was sexier.
- sk2020 6y ago
  Your budget is your priorities.
- jdashg 6y ago
  There was never a high-level plan to deprecate Gecko for Servo, nor C++ for Rust.
- fulafel 6y ago
  This is the classic problem described in The Mythical Man-Month. Recruiting more programmers to accelerate shipping your dev version just makes it later. edit: also it's not clear how accelerating Rust use (meaning rewrites) would help market share in the short or medium term. it seems more like a necessary investment for the long term survivability and has to be paced wisely, like it has so far.
  - HappyDreamer 6y ago
    Not the Man-Month problem. > Recruiting more programmers to accelerate shipping The one you replied to wrote about firing people, not recruiting more people.
dandellion 6y ago
This is a really cool gimmick, but meanwhile... I've been using Firefox exclusively for 20 years but recently I had no choice but to switch to Chrome for work meetings because the microphone would get randomly disconnected in Firefox. I really hope Mozilla wake up and switch their focus back to trying to make the best browser possible and not wasting time with spin-offs like this one or I'm afraid soon there will be nothing left but Chrome.
- this_user 6y ago
  I wish they would fix Firefox Mobile. Their recent redesign has largely destroyed the usability in terms of UI while also removing key features like the ability to install arbitrary addons. This is by far the most poorly thought out change that I have ever seen an established piece of software make.
  - livre 6y ago
    What's broken besides being able to install unapproved add-ons? The new redesign made it usable on my old phone, the old Firefox mobile was too slow for it and would frequently run out of memory. And the new UI with tabs on bottom made it usable on my new phone that has a big screen.
    - cpeterso 6y ago
      Firefox Nightly for Android now has a debug setting to allow installing any add-on from addons.mozilla.org, not just the (growing) list of add-ons blessed by Mozilla QA: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
    - csande17 6y ago
      Here's my personal gripe list: - The New Tab Page isn't an actual page that lives in a tab anymore. Instead, it's a sort of "launcher" that lives outside the tabs. This creates all sort of bizarre UX issues, like if you click on a top-site, click back, and click on another top-site, you now have two tabs open. - The tab switcher has been replaced with a janky spring-loaded pop-tart that appears to have been lifted directly from the Google Maps search results screen without any understanding of why it works in that context. - Several important areas of the UI are now dedicated to "Collections", a feature that's just like bookmark folders (which are still present), except for weird subtle differences like not syncing properly. - You can no longer display your bookmarks on the New Tab Page. - You can no longer use themes other than the included "light" or "dark". - You can't navigate to data URIs anymore -- you get a generic something-bad-happened error instead. - A thousand little UI papercuts. Why do half the animations do weird-looking double fades? Why is the New Tab Page scrollable even when there's no additional content to reveal by scrolling? Why are the contents of the hamburger menu slightly different when you're on the New Tab Page?
haxiomic 6y ago
I've recently been getting into VRChat and I think something really special is happening there. VRChat has made it possible for users to create their own avatars and worlds (like Mozilla Hubs), including scripting and shaders. I'm absolutely _floored_ by the creativity and talent I've seen in abundance there. It reminds me of the early internet, where people are creating things for the only purpose of connecting with others. Similarly I feel lucky to experience this period in VR because I don't think it can last this way forever. It's also as addictive as we were led to believe in science fiction! Numerous people I've met there have clocked _thousands_ of hours in VR, so I'm fully sold that social VR is going to be a major part of the future *If you read this and decide to try it yourself, heads up: you have to do some searching to find the gems – the demographic skews quite young and male so you may find jumping into a random world is chaotic to say the least! It's also far from a polished experience. I like to spend time in quieter spaces like the sign-language practise world (it's amazing to be able to practise any time with real people!) and drawing worlds A world I came across recently that you might enjoy is "ShaderFes 2019" – it's a shader museum! [0][1] I'm less convinced more serious social VR will do so well initially as I suspect the surrealism and unconstrained creative-weirdness that VRChat makes possible goes a long way to diffuse the uncanny valley and awkwardness inherent with the current state of the technology [0] https://youtu.be/Em4JYyKu2d8?t=479 https://youtu.be/Em4JYyKu2d8?t=479 [1] https://www.vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45ee-be58-4fafbbd38139 https://www.vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e...
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Cool, sounds like Snow Crash is finally happening in real live! :) Now some needs to build Black Sun in VRChat to move it to the next level. ;)
  - usrusr 6y ago
    The Virus involved isn't exactly Sumerian NLP hacks and Uber Eats isn't quite Cosa Nostra Pizza yet, but yeah, it feels increasingly accurate in more ways than expected. These days a lot of dystopian fiction seems to do that.
- 6y ago
bassman9000 6y ago
https://github.com/mozilla/hubs/blob/master/PRIVACY.md https://github.com/mozilla/hubs/blob/master/PRIVACY.md Your presence and communications are sent to Mozilla and other Room participants.
- stonogo 6y ago
  It's ... a hosted chat app. Where the hell are they supposed to send presence and communications?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bassman9000 6y ago
    If you had read the link you'd see things like automatic opt in in google analytics.
    - stonogo 6y ago
      Which has nothing to do with the "presence and communications" data you actually commented about.
    - gfodor 6y ago
      The GA tracking is super basic and doesn’t track individual URLs (I implemented it, see the source)
Dahoon 6y ago
Yet another nail in the coffin of Mozilla.
stevenicr 6y ago
This is really cool imho - and can have many different use cases. I poked around and considering diving into this more. Curious about the self hosted version, and I'd like more info about "You will need to provide a database" - type of database needed? link to some articles on connecting DB from one server to another perhaps? Quick scrolling for terms of use - not seen... I have not read all the docs, but did a search for the words porn and sex and did not find results - I hate to assume things - but at the moment I am assuming it's up to the individual room creators as to what kind of discussions can be had.. and if we self hosted, having some that got into adults only discussions would be fine?
sarcastix 6y ago
Sure thing Moz' just make sure it works in Chromium.
- benatkin 6y ago
  Where were you when seomoz rebranded to moz? First I've heard someone call Mozilla Moz. I was mildly annoyed when seomoz rebranded to Moz but had to admit that I didn't think it was confusing at all.
gfodor 6y ago
I wrote the story behind Mozilla Hubs a few months ago for anyone wondering “Why is Mozilla working on this?” https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635490d https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635... Also here is a talk I gave on the reasons social VR is important to work on for anyone who cares about a healthy Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5w8xbeCc2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5w8xbeCc2Q
Multicomp 6y ago
This reminds me of Microsoft V-Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat
donohoe 6y ago
Dear Mozilla, please invest more in design. This just looks like creepy no-limbed children dead-staring eachother.
- jpangs88 6y ago
  I also thought the avatars looked creepy. I understand that this could be useful but is it more useful than MDN??? (Personally I don't think so).
onelastjob 6y ago
The "focus" feature in Hubs is terrible. There needs to be a way to focus (aka view in full screen) on something without having to hold down the f key. If screen sharing was as good as it is in Zoom, Hubs could actually be a Zoom replacement for online classes. But not being able to share your screen in a way that the others can view full screen makes Hubs unusable.
appleflaxen 6y ago
this is technically impressive, and slightly fun initially, due to its novelty. But I have no idea what Mozilla thinks is going to happen with this that is relevant (let alone strategically important) to Mozilla.
- err4nt 6y ago
  I saw from people related to Mozilla on Twitter that when they had their most recent major layoff, they canned the entire research department except for the Hubs team, and that Mozilla was planning on turning Hubs into a revenue stream. So you might say they have pivoted to this, or have dropped everything else in pursuit of this.
1MachineElf 6y ago
I don't really care for all of Mozilla's posturing and non-Firefox projects. If they're not going to improve Firefox, ideally by putting Servo into it, then I don't see a reason to use it over un-Google'd Chromium.

145 points by part1of2 6y ago

Dear Mozilla, Please allocate more time and energy towards becoming financially healthy. Please. There's so much demand for a trusted and privacy conscious service provider. Please look at email, domain registration, web analytics, etc, etc, etc.

ericflo 6y ago
Dear Mozilla, Please continue your work on this. It's one of the lowest-cost, highest-leveraged points of counterbalance against Facebook's continued attempts to dominate the platforms of the future. In addition, there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort, so if you stick with it, other Mozilla efforts will be buoyed by its success.
- core-questions 6y ago
  No, this is silly, it's like Second Life or something else, it's only ever going to be used by Extremely Online people who will never pay a cent for the infra needed to run it or for the coders, and it will sap away at the important part of what Mozilla is doing. > there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort if you want an internet which consists of poorly rendered VRML-looking crap that bothers you for micropayments continuously, ok, sure, but most of us really want something that keeps the big FAANG types honest, and Firefox is one of the keystones of that effort.
  - mplewis 6y ago
    This looks like a novel attempt at an open, collaborative space. Why do you have to be so negative about it?
    - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
      Their money can and needs to be spent elsewhere. But then again who am I to tell them how to spend? This project isn't going anywhere, I guarantee it - but at the sane time I'd also like to be proved wrong on that.
wlesieutre 6y ago
From a product perspective, I do think this is an important one in the longer term. VR and AR are going to be big, and Facebook is making a play to own the social space and tie it to their hardware with Horizon. There's literally no one competing with their Quest platform, so they'll be in a market position to turn Horizon into the dominant social environment for a whole lot of VR users. Without cross-platform social systems like this, you end up in a world where your grandma has an Oculus headset and if you want to virtually visit them you need to be on a Quest as well. BigScreen is another example that I'm glad still exists. Facebook would like to either own them or crush them: https://twitter.com/DShankar/status/1295825811748999173 https://twitter.com/DShankar/status/1295825811748999173 > When I announced a beta version of @BigscreenVR in 2015/2016, Facebook reached out. They told me to join them, because they were going to build the same thing and crush us. > I have many stories like this. I can share a long list of VR devs who have been trampled by Facebook.
- jms703 6y ago
  Perhaps, but Mozilla need to pick their battle. They can’t keep splitting their resources on so many fronts.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    Maybe there's a way that Hubs can make money? "Virtual office service" seems like the obvious answer in this growing remote work situation (see also: Immersed VR), but with Facebook's lower level hardware access they may be poised to eat that space too.
    - entropicdrifter 6y ago
      Hardware-agnostic seems like a big selling point for Mozilla's service vs FB. Unless my company is going to go all-in and buy everyone a 'work headset' like how we have work laptops, they'll want it to be cross platform compatible so users have a choice.
    - Tossrock 6y ago
      Hubs already makes money, by offering turn-key self-hosted Hubs instances for corporations via AWS image.
Kiro 6y ago
For ideological reasons, yes, but not for financial. I think you're overestimating the demand.
throw_m239339 6y ago
Mozilla ditched FirefoxOS for throw away projects (there is no other way to call these), FirefoxOS now KaiOS that has received more than $50 Millions in investment and is deployed on 100M cell phones, basically the 3rd OS in popularity after Android and IOS... I question Mozilla's management judgement...
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Mozilla is an insurance policy for Google to show they have competition. Anything else you see there is a falsity. I say this as a Mozilla browser and vpn user. They have no reasonable market share to speak of anymore and no direction.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Every time I see this I'm just going to ask, why Yahoo was willing $500 million a year to Google's insurance policy?
throwaway413 6y ago
Click link in Firefox on iOS... Get greeted with notice that says “Please copy paste URL into safari, your browser isn’t supported.” Proceed to roll eyes.
- jeremiahlee 6y ago
  I came here to note the same experience. Come on, Mozilla…
perryizgr8 6y ago
IMO Mozilla should allocate 40% of their funding from Google every year into a sustainability fund. Keep it invested in very safe bonds or something. In 5 years Mozilla will be financially independent. Then they can do all this fancy stuff.
- err4nt 6y ago
  But then how would you enrich the CEO?
Vinnl 6y ago
I think one of the reason Hubs was kept on was exactly because it appears to be on a path to being financially healthy while still being relevant to a free and open web: https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635490d https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635...

andreyk 6y ago

Having tried this, I think it's super impressive. I used it to set up social events to welcome new people to our group, and it went quite well. Honestly not sure why it is not more known, it's miles ahead of stuff like online.town and anything else I've seen.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

Amusingly, this link does not work in Firefox Focus. It tells me to open the link in Safari.

azinman2 6y ago

I think it's hilarious that it says 'Communicate naturally' with a photo of 3 legless avatar bodies floating in a poorly rendered 3D environment.

kiliancs 6y ago
Came here to say more or less the same thing. The lack of arms was what made it immediately awkward to me, even just looking at a still image.
- amongsus 6y ago
  If they attach it to running around a ship, completing tasks, getting killed by impostors, hiding in vents, and spacing people.... It would make a pretty good game.
- jayd16 6y ago
  You have hand tracking. There's no elbow tracking so full arm IK becomes problematic. You can still wave your hands and point at things so its more natural than the photo appears.

anonyfox 6y ago

I‘d prefer if mozilla would have finished Firefox’ transition to Rust/Servo to make their core product dramatically better and start regaining browser share. Seems that accumulating expensive C-suits, firing a chunk of their best engineers and building this instead was sexier.

sk2020 6y ago
Your budget is your priorities.
jdashg 6y ago
There was never a high-level plan to deprecate Gecko for Servo, nor C++ for Rust.
fulafel 6y ago
This is the classic problem described in The Mythical Man-Month. Recruiting more programmers to accelerate shipping your dev version just makes it later. edit: also it's not clear how accelerating Rust use (meaning rewrites) would help market share in the short or medium term. it seems more like a necessary investment for the long term survivability and has to be paced wisely, like it has so far.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Not the Man-Month problem. > Recruiting more programmers to accelerate shipping The one you replied to wrote about firing people, not recruiting more people.

dandellion 6y ago

This is a really cool gimmick, but meanwhile... I've been using Firefox exclusively for 20 years but recently I had no choice but to switch to Chrome for work meetings because the microphone would get randomly disconnected in Firefox. I really hope Mozilla wake up and switch their focus back to trying to make the best browser possible and not wasting time with spin-offs like this one or I'm afraid soon there will be nothing left but Chrome.

this_user 6y ago
I wish they would fix Firefox Mobile. Their recent redesign has largely destroyed the usability in terms of UI while also removing key features like the ability to install arbitrary addons. This is by far the most poorly thought out change that I have ever seen an established piece of software make.
- livre 6y ago
  What's broken besides being able to install unapproved add-ons? The new redesign made it usable on my old phone, the old Firefox mobile was too slow for it and would frequently run out of memory. And the new UI with tabs on bottom made it usable on my new phone that has a big screen.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Firefox Nightly for Android now has a debug setting to allow installing any add-on from addons.mozilla.org, not just the (growing) list of add-ons blessed by Mozilla QA: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
  - csande17 6y ago
    Here's my personal gripe list: - The New Tab Page isn't an actual page that lives in a tab anymore. Instead, it's a sort of "launcher" that lives outside the tabs. This creates all sort of bizarre UX issues, like if you click on a top-site, click back, and click on another top-site, you now have two tabs open. - The tab switcher has been replaced with a janky spring-loaded pop-tart that appears to have been lifted directly from the Google Maps search results screen without any understanding of why it works in that context. - Several important areas of the UI are now dedicated to "Collections", a feature that's just like bookmark folders (which are still present), except for weird subtle differences like not syncing properly. - You can no longer display your bookmarks on the New Tab Page. - You can no longer use themes other than the included "light" or "dark". - You can't navigate to data URIs anymore -- you get a generic something-bad-happened error instead. - A thousand little UI papercuts. Why do half the animations do weird-looking double fades? Why is the New Tab Page scrollable even when there's no additional content to reveal by scrolling? Why are the contents of the hamburger menu slightly different when you're on the New Tab Page?

haxiomic 6y ago

I've recently been getting into VRChat and I think something really special is happening there. VRChat has made it possible for users to create their own avatars and worlds (like Mozilla Hubs), including scripting and shaders. I'm absolutely _floored_ by the creativity and talent I've seen in abundance there. It reminds me of the early internet, where people are creating things for the only purpose of connecting with others. Similarly I feel lucky to experience this period in VR because I don't think it can last this way forever. It's also as addictive as we were led to believe in science fiction! Numerous people I've met there have clocked _thousands_ of hours in VR, so I'm fully sold that social VR is going to be a major part of the future *If you read this and decide to try it yourself, heads up: you have to do some searching to find the gems – the demographic skews quite young and male so you may find jumping into a random world is chaotic to say the least! It's also far from a polished experience. I like to spend time in quieter spaces like the sign-language practise world (it's amazing to be able to practise any time with real people!) and drawing worlds A world I came across recently that you might enjoy is "ShaderFes 2019" – it's a shader museum! [0][1] I'm less convinced more serious social VR will do so well initially as I suspect the surrealism and unconstrained creative-weirdness that VRChat makes possible goes a long way to diffuse the uncanny valley and awkwardness inherent with the current state of the technology [0] https://youtu.be/Em4JYyKu2d8?t=479 https://youtu.be/Em4JYyKu2d8?t=479 [1] https://www.vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e6-45ee-be58-4fafbbd38139 https://www.vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e...

m4rtink 6y ago
Cool, sounds like Snow Crash is finally happening in real live! :) Now some needs to build Black Sun in VRChat to move it to the next level. ;)
- usrusr 6y ago
  The Virus involved isn't exactly Sumerian NLP hacks and Uber Eats isn't quite Cosa Nostra Pizza yet, but yeah, it feels increasingly accurate in more ways than expected. These days a lot of dystopian fiction seems to do that.
6y ago

bassman9000 6y ago

https://github.com/mozilla/hubs/blob/master/PRIVACY.md https://github.com/mozilla/hubs/blob/master/PRIVACY.md Your presence and communications are sent to Mozilla and other Room participants.

stonogo 6y ago
It's ... a hosted chat app. Where the hell are they supposed to send presence and communications?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bassman9000 6y ago
  If you had read the link you'd see things like automatic opt in in google analytics.
  - stonogo 6y ago
    Which has nothing to do with the "presence and communications" data you actually commented about.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    The GA tracking is super basic and doesn’t track individual URLs (I implemented it, see the source)

Dahoon 6y ago

Yet another nail in the coffin of Mozilla.

stevenicr 6y ago

This is really cool imho - and can have many different use cases. I poked around and considering diving into this more. Curious about the self hosted version, and I'd like more info about "You will need to provide a database" - type of database needed? link to some articles on connecting DB from one server to another perhaps? Quick scrolling for terms of use - not seen... I have not read all the docs, but did a search for the words porn and sex and did not find results - I hate to assume things - but at the moment I am assuming it's up to the individual room creators as to what kind of discussions can be had.. and if we self hosted, having some that got into adults only discussions would be fine?

sarcastix 6y ago

Sure thing Moz' just make sure it works in Chromium.

benatkin 6y ago
Where were you when seomoz rebranded to moz? First I've heard someone call Mozilla Moz. I was mildly annoyed when seomoz rebranded to Moz but had to admit that I didn't think it was confusing at all.

gfodor 6y ago

I wrote the story behind Mozilla Hubs a few months ago for anyone wondering “Why is Mozilla working on this?” https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635490d https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-path-to-mozilla-hubs-2697e635... Also here is a talk I gave on the reasons social VR is important to work on for anyone who cares about a healthy Internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5w8xbeCc2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5w8xbeCc2Q

Multicomp 6y ago

This reminds me of Microsoft V-Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat

donohoe 6y ago

Dear Mozilla, please invest more in design. This just looks like creepy no-limbed children dead-staring eachother.

jpangs88 6y ago
I also thought the avatars looked creepy. I understand that this could be useful but is it more useful than MDN??? (Personally I don't think so).

onelastjob 6y ago

The "focus" feature in Hubs is terrible. There needs to be a way to focus (aka view in full screen) on something without having to hold down the f key. If screen sharing was as good as it is in Zoom, Hubs could actually be a Zoom replacement for online classes. But not being able to share your screen in a way that the others can view full screen makes Hubs unusable.

appleflaxen 6y ago

this is technically impressive, and slightly fun initially, due to its novelty. But I have no idea what Mozilla thinks is going to happen with this that is relevant (let alone strategically important) to Mozilla.

err4nt 6y ago
I saw from people related to Mozilla on Twitter that when they had their most recent major layoff, they canned the entire research department except for the Hubs team, and that Mozilla was planning on turning Hubs into a revenue stream. So you might say they have pivoted to this, or have dropped everything else in pursuit of this.

1MachineElf 6y ago

I don't really care for all of Mozilla's posturing and non-Firefox projects. If they're not going to improve Firefox, ideally by putting Servo into it, then I don't see a reason to use it over un-Google'd Chromium.